


Was, Is, Will Be

by iKain2



Category: Berserk, Vindictus
Genre: According To My Notes That Hurk/Kai Tag Is Very Complicated Actually, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst and Tragedy, Berserk Volume 27 Beach Mini-Arc, Blood and Gore, Crack, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Horror, Incomplete, Multi, That Casca & Guts Tag Is Appropriate... But Only If I Continue, UNFINISHED!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 23:41:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9095752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iKain2/pseuds/iKain2
Summary: The final battle with Cichol goes horribly wrong, and Hurk finds himself gravely wounded in a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The nowhere-finished crossover that I wish someone else wrote. You know, if you think about it hard enough, Berserk universe is just a worse version of the already crappy universe in Vindictus. Big giant monsters? Check. Corrupted powers and magic? Check. An army of humanoid and monstrous creatures under the power of a charismatic human who sacrificed humanity to gain power? Check. Only major difference is that Griffith is prettier than Keaghan, hah.
> 
> Please take this piece of cracky doodoo that's been sitting in my hard drive for about 4 years. (；一_一)

Through the numbed haze clouding his mind, Hurk was only vaguely aware of his blood dripping sluggishly from the gaping wound in his side as he forced himself to keep walking along the sandy beachfront, swaying unsteadily with each step as the cold night-time air seeped through the cracks of his broken K-9 armor. The ocean waves lapped gently against his feet, but he paid the sting of salt water no mind.

His only thought was to keep moving, lest the strange, mutated lizardmen-like creatures would finally catch up and finish him off.

The K-9 greatsword strapped to his back was like deadweight for him to carry in his wounded state, but necessity and instinct had kept him from tossing the heavy weapon despite that he was in no shape to be fighting.

The pain suddenly pierced his numbed daze and returned with an unearthly vengeance. Hurk collapsed to the ground, his gore-and-blood-smeared hands pressed tightly against the ends of the jagged wound in his side. More blood began to leak through his fingers, and with each passing second he could feel the cold chill settling deeper into his body.

Something else broke. Another rib, probably.

The creatures were near; he could practically _smell_ the festering rot and disease bounding in his direction, ready to tear him to pieces. Hurk forced himself up into a crouch and unhooked his greatsword, despite his lightheadedness and the fact that the edge of his vision was beginning to fill with dark spots.

An inhuman roar echoed across the beachfront, and Hurk's split lips curled into a menacing snarl to reveal pointed, blood-splattered teeth.

Come hell or worse, he wasn't going to give up. _Not yet_ , his feverish mind chanted, _not_ _ **yet**_.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**/ Heide, Before /  
**

“KEAGHAN!” Hurk dodged the vicious swipe of the greatsword aiming for his head and parried the successive blow, stunning the human-turned-fomor and sending him skidding backwards a few meters.

“YOUR EFFORTS ARE IN VAIN!” Keaghan, or what was left of him after Cichol had taken over, gave an insane roar and redoubled his efforts in trying to reduce everything around him into rubble and dust. “NO ONE WILL STAND IN MY WAY! I! MUST! SAVE! TIEVE!”

The two greatsword-wielders were fighting head-to-head, sparing barely a blink as they traded swing after swing of their huge weapons, smashing craters into the ground and sending debris flying. Between the few scant seconds of Hurk's attacks, a heavily-armored Fiona laid out punishing counters whenever she could as she alternated between shielding Evie and Lann from being hit while they were attacking.

Evie sent out flurries of flames, ice, and lightning nonstop, barely stopping to recover from each spell as she tried to wear down Keaghan's darkness-coated armor. Lann dodged back-and-forth between hits as he tried to cut through the weak points exposed by Evie's magic.

Karok tried to keep Keaghan busy every other moment by bashing and smashing whenever he could, sending the darkness-crazed human stumbling back and forth between himself and Hurk.

Vella, on the other hand, was trapped with Kai next to one of the Devil Statues, furiously trying to destroy both the statue and the barrier so they could make their way back to the main group.

“KEAGHAN, STOP THIS!” Hurk missed a parry and received a brutal gash to his arm for his mistake.

“I AM CICHOL!” The frenzied fomor-man gave an inhuman snarl as he batted Lann away like an unwanted insect, sending him skidding several meters away. The dual-wielder didn't get up. “I AM GOD!”

Hurk ducked under the wide swing and shifted his stance in preparation for his next strike, the darkness-coated greatsword passing over the top of his head with a scant inch of clearance.

Hurk spotted that on the tassel of Keaghan's – no, Cichol's – greatsword, the unnaturally closed eyes on the strange crimson bauble suddenly opened, the tiny face twisted into a misshapen expression of terror as blood began to stream from the unfocused eyes.

Karok managed to get a hold onto the fomor after one of Evie's ice spears had frozen it for a scant moment and drove a fist through its through the twisted creature, sending Cichol crashing to the ground when the giant's cestus exploded a fireball in its chest. Hurk took in a breath before charging after the stunned fomor, Fiona and Karok right at his heels.

The crimson bauble was ripped from its place on the greatsword's tassel and skittered for a few meters before landing in a sludgy puddle of fomor-and-human blood. Hurk didn't spare it a single glance as he urged himself faster to close the distance before Cichol could recover.

The skies above suddenly turned maroon, the clouds from white to dark gray, and the weak sun into an all-consuming pitch black. The screams of hundreds of thousands of dying suddenly filled Hurk's ears with earsplitting noise, and he looked down when he felt himself stepping on something that definitely wasn't stone.

It was the face of a nameless individual, its expression distorted into one of indescribable pain and agony as bloody tears streaked out of eyeless sockets. The whole battlefield was now an endless field of tortured faces screeching incomprehensibly, and Hurk twisted around in horror as dark shadows rose up from between the hills and formed into snarling creatures indescribable in their gruesome appearances.

The creatures weren't fomors, not by a long shot. They were... he had _no_ words for what they were.

A scream came from behind him, and Hurk turned to see the now-conscious Lann wrapped tightly within several tentacles. He didn't have so much as a moment to begin moving when the tentacles suddenly pulled, and Lann was reduced from a tangible human to a mist of splattered blood and gore.

The monsters began to feast on the corpse of his friend and began converging towards Evie. The magician's mana amber couldn't hold up for long, but it was her best defense for now in her exhausted state.

Fiona was doing her best to cut down the monsters surrounding her, several thrice as tall as her and wearing the bones of the deceased as if they were armor, but it was clear that she was going to be overwhelmed very soon. Karok had already burst into his dark knight form and had taken to deliriously beating up any monster that dared come close to Evie's mana amber with his bare hands after his cestus had gotten stuck in belly of one of the creatures.

They could not go against such a force indefinitely.

All Hurk could see was red, and he charged at the monster nearest to him with a primal battle-cry. The creature was sliced in half within a second, but another quickly took its place. It seemed that no matter how many he cut down, several more would suddenly appear.

Where were they? What was this place? Hurk had no time to waste on such questions when a shrill cry of pain was cut short, somewhere to his right. Through the haze in his mind, Hurk stabbed his greatsword through a giant monster and ripped its foul-smelling organs out to splatter on the ground. Something hit his boot, and he looked down.

It was Vella's decapitated head. The eyeless sockets and missing nose seared itself into his memory, right next to the constant replay of Lann's brutal dismemberment. Something in him, something instinct-driven, sent a shock of icy revulsion through his veins.

His friends were dying all around him, and he couldn't do anything about it.

A large shadow covered him, and Hurk looked up to see a giant hand made of the screaming faces slowly rising upwards, towards the blackened sun.

Cichol.

“MAKE FOR THAT HAND!” Hurk screamed above the noisy din, hoping that his friends – the ones still living – could hear him. “WE'VE GOT TO STOP CICHOL!”

“GO!” Fiona bashed several monsters at once, refusing to relinquish her broken shield. Her right arm was hanging limply at her side at an odd angle. “WE'LL HOLD THEM OFF!”

“NO!” Hurk wasn't going to leave his friends, his _**family**_. They were all he had. “WE GO TOGETHER!”

“GO!” This time, it was Karok who roared. He was defensively posed in front of Evie's unmoving form. Hurk felt bile rising to the back of his mouth and forced himself to shove the thought of the magician's death to a corner of his mind. “WE'LL CATCH UP! GO!”

Hurk took one look at the fierce expressions on their blood-splattered faces, knowing that this might as well be the last time he would see his comrades-in-arms alive, and then turned his back to them and began running towards the unnatural hand-structure.

 **COWARD**! The howls and cackles of the monsters behind him only spurred him faster. **COWARD**! **KILL THE COWARD**!

 **I AM NOT A COWARD**! The tiny voice at the back of his head screamed, but it was drowned out by the barbaric chanting of the monsters barely kept pace with him as he forced himself to go faster.

Once close enough to the towering hand, Hurk leaped onto the nearest monster, using the creature as a springboard onto a taller monster. He only managed to get halfway up in relative height of the tower when he launched himself at the structure of screaming faces and dug his greatsword in like an anchor.

Hurk began his painstaking climb upwards, numbing himself to the cries of the faces whenever he jabbed his sword through and pushed up.

From his height above the battlefield, he dared not look backwards when he heard Fiona's final cry of anguish as she fell to the innumerable monsters that hungrily and savagely tore into her body. Karok's death was just as bone-chillingly loud as he took down one of the largest monsters along with him, sending him, Evie, and it into a fiery grave that scorched several other monsters around him into ashes and cinders.

Hurk swallowed down the knot in his throat and focused solely on going up. He had only one goal on his mind: **KILL CHICOL**.

Once at the top, Hurk dragged himself from the edge and closer to the middle, where the figure of Cichol, surrounded by a swirling vortex of darkness, was standing. The fomor was facing him with an unreadable expression on the helmeted face, and the unnerving red eye was looking straight at Hurk.

“CICHOL!” Hurk's voice was hoarse and his mouth felt like sandpaper. The pure insanity of this place was beginning to dig deeper into his mind. His hands tightened on the blood-slicked handle of his greatsword, and charged forward with the intention of sending the tip of his blade straight through the fomor's chest.

When he was close enough to strike, Cichol's image blurred and suddenly Hurk's greatsword punched through someone **else's** stomach.

Kai, glassy eyes wide and with blood spilling from his mouth, stared back at him in delayed shock. His hand had been reaching out towards him, gloved fingers barely brushing his cheek.

“No… no, no no! **NO!** ”

Hurk's entire body froze in horror and watched, the scene immediately burned into his retinas, as the archer slid from his greatsword and fell backwards to the ground, dead. Hurk stared at the blood coating his sword, an icy dread crawling up from his stomach and forcing past his mouth.

Hurk collapsed to his knees and vomited. All that came out was blood, his blood.

“I AM GOD!” A gauntleted hand curled around his neck in a crushing grip and lifted him up, leaving Hurk to dangle without touching the ground as he gagged and choked. “APOSTLES! **HEAR ME!** ”

A greatsword ripped through his side, and Hurk couldn't help the ragged scream that tore from his throat. The searing, burning pain just went **on and on and on**...

“I SACRIFICE THIS PIECE OF ERINN! TAKE ALL OF IT – JUST GIVE ME THE POWER TO GET **HER** BACK!”

The darkness quickly descended when Cichol pulled his greatsword out from Hurk's chest with a sickly noise, but not before a flash of pure light appeared at the edge of his vision.

As he slipped into what he felt was certain death, the last thought that ran through his mind was:

_**I refuse to die**._


	3. Chapter 3

Hurk met the first clash of claws and teeth with his greatsword, sending several of the foul Thor-like creatures smashing into one another with a determined swing. He quickly followed up with a brutal stab, skewering three of the closest monsters onto his sword before slamming them into several others around him.

He dared not stop, even as he felt himself getting weaker and weaker as his transcendent skill ate up most of the health that he was still in him. Hurk spat out a mouthful of blood and dodged yet another creature's attempt at biting him with their overly-large mouths full of jagged teeth. The ocean surf crashed a wave of salty water into his leg, stinging the exposed wounds that oozed pain instead of blood, now.

Hurk's vision suddenly blacked out, and he felt his consciousness forcibly pulled from him as the spirit of the Dark Knight inside him broke free from its confinements; the chitinous black outer-casing and spikes of the second form exploded into existence, the last of his life-force spraying out from the cracks and chinks in the armor, and the Dark Knight began to slaughter _everything_ in sight.

The Dark Knight was acting solely on survival instinct now, blind to pain and panic.

It felt nothing, except the urge to kill, to replenish, to _**consume**_.

A blood-curdling grin stretched across the Dark Knight's chitinous faceplate as it savagely tore his way through the mass. The creatures screamed as they were being cut down faster than they could recover, and soon the mob was culled into barely a dozen. The few remaining turned tail and tried to escape.

The Dark Knight didn't let them get more than a few feet away before it ripped them apart with his bare hands; Hurk's gore-streaked greatsword was stuck in the gullets of several other monsters.

Hurk could feel a hint of consciousness returning to him, but the Dark Knight stubbornly refused to relinquish hold of its physicality just yet as it ground a bony heel into a pile of lizardmen guts. The powerful magic that had kept it tightly chained and under control in the Other World was much weaker now, and damned if it wasn't going to take advantage of that.

Floating half-awake in the pitch-black abyss, Hurk suddenly was blinded by the materialization of a white light in front of him. The light converged into the shape of a figure, vaguely resembling a very young child in appearance. The child simply floated in the vacuum, waiting patiently with a hand outstretched.

“ _Follow_.”

Obeying the soft command, Hurk reached out with an immaterial grasp and gently took hold of the surprisingly warm fingers...

… and suddenly, the dark veil fell and he was standing in the real world.

He was holding the hand of a small child with skin as pale as moonlight and hair as dark as the abyss. The owlish eyes, equally black, peered curiously up at Hurk, looking through him as if he knew _exactly_ who he was.

Hurk simply didn't have the energy to comprehend how the boy in the flowing tunic had penetrated the uncontrollable, raging inferno that was his Dark Knight form. The massive blood loss and his severe wounds did little to stop him from dangerously swaying on his feet. His head ached with a what felt like a concussion, and it was pure willpower that kept him from collapsing onto the sand.

However, something else caught the bulk of his attention...

Hurk stared at the boy, and the boy stared back with a facsimile of a smile on its thin face. Faintly, he heard himself croak out a whisper through cracked lips, “Impossible... how...”

Hurk stared blankly at the vaguely familiar-looking child that held his hand.

The insurmountable pain surged back once the last of the effects of the Dark Knight form had worn off, and Hurk felt the tiny fingers slip from his palm as his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he fell forward, his unconscious body convulsing involuntarily into the sands of the beach as if he had been struck by lightning.

The child took a step forward and crouched down next to the man, carefully angled away from the twitching arms, and pressed his tiny fingers onto a scrap of cloth that was a part of the broken chestplate. When the child lifted the cloth aside, he saw a small brand – blood sluggishly seeping from the wound – that had been freshly carved deep into the skin, muscle, and down to the bone.

The brand of a sacrifice.

The child took a step back; he did not have the capacity to comprehend that he was another reality. All he knew was that this man, with a cursed brand on his side, was very important. He needed to survive.

The man's spasms subsided, and the chest rose with the scant, pained wheezes of an unconsciousness close to death.

“HEY! **KID!!** OVER HERE! I FOUND THE KID!” An older boy, about twelve years old with spiky ginger hair, jumped off a small sand cliff and began to run over to the child.

Once the older boy had come close enough, the child gave a bland smile as he stood next to the gravely injured man on the ground.

“So this is where you– ugh, is he dead?” Isidro skidded to a stop and toed at the prone figure on the ground. Then, he noticed the dozen-or-so piles of mangled alligator-familiar corpses surrounding the area. “Woah, did he do this?”

The child made a noise and shrugged nonchalantly.

“ISIDRO!” Schierke's voice rang over from a hill of sand. Following closely behind her was the rest of the party.

“OVER HERE!” Isidro climbed up the sand cliff and waved his arms around to be seen. “THERE'S A DEAD GUY TOO!”

The blood-covered man hacked out a rattling cough and weakly tried to roll over onto his side after the younger child had curiously stuck his fingers up his broken nose.

“OH WAIT, HE'S NOT DEAD. YET. Hey… woah, this sword is _heavy_!”


	4. Chapter 4

Guts had initially wanted to just abandon the almost-dead man behind and leave this place as quickly as possible, but the stare the child had given him before stubbornly perching next to a finally-calmed Casca and the unknown man had made Guts sigh inwardly but acquiesce. Schierke's indisputable insistence in staying to heal the man, or at least make his passing easier, made it clear that they were going to stay.

The stranger's fever burned hot throughout the night, but miraculously broke the following morning with the help of Schierke's magic and some of the strange potions that Isidro and Puck had found while rummaging through the man's large traveling pack. The man, however, remained unconscious.

To pass the time, Guts sharpened and cleaned his weapons. He also took the time to examine the stranger's equally-strange weapon, mostly to get a gist of how strong the man was; the greatsword was of no design he had ever seen before, the metal surprisingly light but nearly as large and as strong as his Dragonslayer.

The equally-foriegn remnants of the man's armor, the scars, and the sword were all just the obvious signs that pointed to the man being a seasoned fighter of some sort.

Who was he? An unlucky mercenary? One of Griffith's spies? An apostle?

But, then... the brand... it was the same brand as his and Casca's, except it was located below the largest wound in his side that Schierke spent a lot of time tending to. It looked fresh, too.

Had there been another Eclipse? Had he missed another Apostle being created?

“He's waking up!”

Guts was pulled from his thoughts when Schierke gave a cry of relief. He made sure all of his knives were in reach, just in case the man had been rendered violently insane by the Eclipse.

The man blearily opened his eyes, casting his unfocused gaze around the tiny hovel. After a moment, he shot up into a sitting position with alarm clear on his face. “Where am I?!”

“Please, lie back down, you're bleeding really badly!” Schierke put her hands on the man's breastplate in a futile attempt to get him to settle down.

The child in Casca's lap cooed as Casca hugged him closer to herself. Guts noted that he did not seem afraid of the foreigner, strangely enough.

The man ignored Schierke and staggered to his feet, shoving through the doorway. He only was able to walk a few steps before the man fell to his knees on the sand outside, screaming up at the sky in pure anguish.

“ **CICHOL! YOU FUCKING BASTARD! YOU KILLED ALL OF THEM!** ” The man hunched over, shoulders shaking as he punched at the sand with a gauntleted fist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musings on alternate universe selves, since I will probably never continue:  
> Hurk is Demon Child/Moonlight Boy, but grown up in another reality, which is probably why he could cross over realities without dying.  
> Berserk!Kai is a Neo Band of the Hawk minor apostle serving under Irvine.  
> Berserk!Lann is a refugee in Falconia.  
> Berserk!Evie is an accomplished witch in Elfheim.  
> Berserk!Fiona is a guard in Falconia.  
> Berserk!Karok is a minor apostle serving under Grunbeld.  
> Berserk!Vella is one of the pirates on the boat.  
> Berserk!Lynn and Berserk!Sylas are fairies in Elfheim.  
> Berserk!Arisha is a smoking hot mer-folk.  
> Berserk!Delia is some kind of princess refugee/guard in Falconia.


End file.
